IBM Netezza Performance Server Reviews

The performance is most important to me, and it helps our ability to make business decisions quickly.

They should make it work better in a multi-user context. This solution works, but not for the workload we have.

It is stable. We use it in our data warehousing complex, and the performance is good.

The scalability is not as expected. It is shipped to you as an appliance, a black box. If you want to expand it, you have to get an extra CD,or whatever, and they come and program something int he box to release extra bits. If this were a cloud product, you could just expand and subtract as you wish. The capacity in this black box is not enough.

I would rate the tech support a five, on a scale of one to ten. It is obviously not that great. 

We had Teradata before, and I am not really sure why we switched.

Based on first conception, do a POC, scale up to the volumes and get the vendor to prove that it can work with their requirements. Get them to scale it up, either simulate it, make sure it can actually do what it says, rather than buying beta and then get it and then find out that it doesn't actually do everything it says it does.

Our prime use is for warehousing and analytics.

Being an appliance, the best features are its analytics and the performance level.

The underlying hardware that IBM provides with this appliance is made for a specific purpose, to serve performance on a large amount of data, and to do analytics as well. It is faster, when you compare it to any other product, like Hadoop or DXC Hadoop or Presto on AWS. It's made for a specific purpose and it serves that very appropriately.

It really serves its purpose. It meets the need for performance, it meets the need for robustness, and it also serves as a perfect data warehousing appliance. The only issue is that it's not expandable.

The new versions of Netezza, they are expandable. They can be on-prem and on the cloud like dashDB from IBM. It replaces the previous Netezza versions. We are currently on Mako because TwinFin support is going in 2019. Maybe in the next couple of years, we will be replacing Netezza with Redshift.

As a database administrator, and in warehousing part for the last 12 years, we always have stability issues in every technology. So the issue is how well they support their product. IBM does support their product very well. We have had issues where there were queries that were generating billions of rows. It's all about how you understand the underlying architecture. The coder who understands the architecture can write a better query. We sometimes need to educate them. So there are always stability issues but not in terms of hardware or support. It's always how well you write your queries.

If you don't know Netezza, if you don't SQL or you don't know the underlying architecture but you are a good SQL developer, you know all the business logic and you write a query - but it is not actually performing - it's because you have not understood the distribution part of it. You need to consider the distribution keys or the organization keys. That makes the difference.

The stability doesn't depend on the hardware, it depends on your coding in SQL.

If I was using TwinFin appliances, if my data grew to the limit that TwinFin supports, obviously I would have to buy a new appliance. I cannot just ask them to increase the memory or increase the storage or the CPUs. That would cost me another appliance. If our business side agreed to that, I would keep using Netezza and buy a bigger appliance, I'm okay with that. But the expandability is not there.

I would rate the technical support at seven out of 10. We have our own SLAs and they have their own SLAs and things go around that. If we want to a fix in two days, it might be that they are not able to provide it, until it becomes business critical.

Netezza was the first one which we incorporated and started using heavily. Before that, we did test the other data warehousing technology but it was just a PoC and PoV test.

In some of our business areas, they still use SQL Server data warehouses and Oracle data warehouses. But once we moved to Netezza, different business units bought in, and now we are up to Hadoop solutions and AWS solutions.

Once it has been shipped and installed in your data center, it's just the point of plugging it in and the initial configuration. IBM people come and when they install it, they initialize it and then they give us the password and from there we move on in. It's very simple from there.

Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud.

We are also doing a proof of value and proof of concept for AWS and Hadoop DXC.

My client is looking towards replacing Neteeza with one of the up and coming warehousing solutions like Presto. They don't want the in-house or on-prem cost of managing that particular appliance. When everything is available on cloud, we pay less. My client develops medical products. They wanted to concentrate on the medical part, not on how to manage their IT. So they're moving towards more and more towards the cloud to replace the on-prem solution.

My advice would be to fully categorize your needs. Why you need Netezza should be a specific question, because there are so many different analytic solutions and which provide performance and which are cheaper than Netezza. Until you figure out completely that you only need a PDA (pure data analytics) system, you should really look at other products and compare them.

I wouldn't choose Netezza in today's world when we have Redshift, Presto, EMR, when we have Teradata, and when we have Oracle Autonomous. In today's world, you should look at these solutions first. If they don't serve your purpose, then look to Netezza.

In the current world, data is the big question. Nowadays, we are receiving a lot of data. It's like the data generation has come. We have terabytes of data and it might be, in a year or so, you cross the petabyte scale. So go with a petabyte-scale solution instead of a non-expandable Netezza appliance.

We are currently working on the latest Mako version. After that - Mako retires in 2024 - I don't think they have anything on Netezza. What they have is dashDB and Sailfish, which is a completely different product for IBM, but similar to Netezza. And those are expandable.

Netezza is a good product in and of itself, aside from the fact it is not expandable. Overall, it's a good product but definitely has room for improvement.

• The speed of the MPP platform
• The ability to load large amounts of data in very short order
• The fact that the hardware and software are designed to work together and are supported in unison by IBM

We can process through more data much faster than we could with prior technologies.

More monitoring tools would be nice. I have found no tools within the tool which help with long running query issues. I would like to see the ability of static binds so access path can be counted on.

I've been using this since 2010

There were no issues with the deployment.

Stability comes and goes. Every software upgrade removes some problems, but introduces others. None have been critical, though.

There were no issues with the scalability.

It's 7/10 as when something goes wrong within IBM, it can take quite a bit to get it straightened out including a phone call to the sales rep to light fires.

It was a straightforward set-up. You just have to install the appliance, turn it on, and you can start using.

Netezza themselves set up the machines. We implemented our business rules using a vendor team to get us up to speed on MPP processing.

We evaluated this and Greenplum. Netezza won the battle for being an appliance that is wholly supported by the vendor. Greenplum won the individual transaction battle, but it was not enough to overcome the ease of an appliance.

The most difficult time I have with people is getting them to understand that Netezza is not meant for individual transactions, but for full set processing.

Neteeza is a data warehouse for customer analytics. 

We're looking to get away from it, so I can't really say that it improved things. It did augment some of our product delivery resources.

The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format. The appliance format may be the best part.

There won't be another release. They're converting to DB2 and that is one of the reasons we are looking at other options.

In terms of features that I would like to see, one is the ability to actually scale out an architecture. Right now, if you buy one, it's fixed. There is no scale-up availability at all.

It's pretty good when it works. It's pretty stable overall. But if you have a problem, support is a nightmare.

Scalability is not possible.

Technical support has been awful. I found them unwilling to help, and with direct VPN connection to systems, unwilling to actually connect and look at information, which is part of our contract. They did not actually do their job.

We're looking to switch away from Netezza because the platform database system that it runs on is no longer going to be in existence. It's moving to DB2. If it moves to that direction, the amount of changes in logic and queries that it would require is pretty substantial. At that point I would basically be rewriting everything.

When selecting a vendor, obviously I don't want somebody who is brand new. I want somebody who has a track record of actually being around for awhile. It needs to be a company with a product that does the functions that a database should do, and not something that's only a partial solution. There are a lot of solutions out there that do three-quarters of what a warehouse should be doing, but three-quarters of a warehouse are not sufficient.

I wasn't involved in the setup. But it's an appliance, so there is no real setup, other than there is a day for an IBM technician to come out and stand it up.

Vertica was one of them. I looked at it recently. It has limiting factors on things like updates and deletes of data, where it has performance issues. That's a big problem for us. 

I rate Netezza at four out of 10. There is not too much involved to set one up from a customer perspective, but after the initial setup it is pretty awful on the customer support side of it.

My advice would be, check out all options. Don't just go with big-name vendors, because that is not always going to be the right answer.

For now, we use that as our enterprise-wide data warehouse. Performance-wise, it's been great. The speed has been excellent. We haven't really had any hardware issues with it that I'm aware of. We've had it for heavy-use in the past six months to a year. It's been good.

The big benefit that we've had is, in the past with the legacy data warehouse solution, we've been limited to having just a nightly batch, running on SQL Server. It's a slower batch process, so throughout the day we would be limited to stuff that happened as of some time in the evening. 

So the benefit is really because of the additional speed that we have and, truth be told, the more updated ETL processes and the revamped scheduler in general. We've been able to move the refresh timing up to six times a day, so at any given point in the day, the data would be only four hours old, which helps us give much better - not quite real-time data - but closer to real-time data for the day, which helps the decision-makers get the most up-to-date information possible.

The speed.

I would say it's very stable. Whenever we have any sort of outage, the hardware team always communicates it, and it's been months since we've had any sort of outage, outside of the standard maintenance window. There have never really been any issues there. Stability has been good.

For scalability, we're still in process - half the business is still not on this data warehouse, the company is also moving over to a different production system - so the scalability, we'll really see throughout this year, as the rest of the business gets migrated over to that new production system, and that data will be falling into the Netezza data warehouse platform. So for scalability, it's a little too soon to really give an answer yet.

I have not used tech support. I'm not on the hardware team.

Our IT leadership made the decision to go with Netezza before I joined the company, that decision had already been made. Prior to that we were using Microsoft SQL Server.

The only thing that I was really privy to was, Netezza was chosen because of its analytical capabilities and for the ability to process through a very high volume of records and give an aggregate solution from an analysis standpoint, in a very quick fashion.

I was not involved on the hardware side, but I was on the data modeling aspect.

I would say it was straightforward. We used the IBM InfoSphere for the ETL scripts. Those seem to give plenty of visibility for allthe different steps in the ETL process, especially debugging or going in and making modifications as different tickets come through.

Working with some of the other developers, whenever they are given a ticket, it's pretty simple to see what step in the process and additional code needs to be added, or modified, or removed; to see exactly where it is and how it's going to affect things downstream, and to be able to see at what exact point that something has failed. That part, it's been more straightforward and just the visibility of the whole process.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for a data warehouse solution are, obviously, the speed and the ability to handle large amounts of data. That's especially true from an analysis standpoint, and having it not only do the math and select statements but also do more aggregation and analysis-type queries.

The speed has been excellent for us, in pulling information, as well as the batch timing, and the suite of tools that comes with it for the ETL withIBM InfoSphere. Also, the data governance prospect, as a company we haven't really delved too far into that, but from what I've seen, that is a really powerful tool as well, to help with data lineage and keeping track of that. So the speed is good and the suite of tools seems to be very beneficial.

From my standpoint, I would give it a nine out of 10. It has done everything that we needed it to do, it's great. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because, early on, there were a couple of maintenance things that we had to do.

• Supports both business intelligence and advanced analytics
• Efficient even if being used by thousands of users at the same time
• Streaming architecture based on blades
• Compatible with the most popular business intelligence and analytic tools
• Standard SQL, ODBC, JDBC, and OLE DB interfaces

We had lot of POC's on data warehousing project with the help of Netezza, we have proved that it has really improved time on doing analytics

I have used this solution for more than two years

There were no issues with the deployment.

It's reliable and available, with 99.99% uptime.

There were no issues with the scalability.

Support for this product is good.

Initial set-up was straightforward.

It was done by an in-house team.

It is good product if you are choosing to go for datawarehouse business intelligence.

• Lots of space
• Implicit compression
• High Availability with multiple redundancy

The performance has meant that we reclaimed many hours in our batch window. The ease of which we ported data onto it, the fact that it does not take a lot of administration and the overall manageability of the box have improved our company.

Ability to use constraints to enforce uniqueness would be an improvement.

We got our first Netezza box in 2004 and the Pure Data in 2014 following the acquisition by IBM.

A blade failure at the commissioning stage, but the box (and predecessors) have been extremely stable and provides us with lots of scalability.

Very good for this product. It was excellent when it was Netezza and that support seems to have continued with IBM.

Previously used DB2 LUW but this could not provide us with the performance we needed at the time. We looked at Netezza as they were trying to get a foothold in the UK and the portability of data and the speed with which it performed was incredible.

Very straightforward for Pure Data but the initial set-up was affected by the fact that we seemed to get a junior technician from IBM who was not as good as other engineers we have had.

Build a strong relationship with your technical account manager as you will be referring to them quite a lot. Could save many man hours in the long term.

I can't comment on the figures but needless to say it has been a resounding success for us.

IBM support is very good for this product. It has very few issues and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Check for the functional limitations of the logical database e.g there are no such thing as indexes/primary key constraints where you might want to force uniqueness.

We use Aginity to access Netezza database. We really like the way we can dominate the physical distribution of the data hence know how to improve the performance of the query. Netezza on its own is very fast which makes our life easier to run huge queries for analytics.

This has really helped us to improve the performance of our Data Marts and warehouses. We can run our reports very quickly. It has also improved the turn around time of business requests. 

In Aginity there should be a way to format the SQL queries. I think we can't format the query the way we can do it in Oracle editor (beautifier). Say, for example, if we are trying to get the DDL of an existing view, we lost the formatting. It's a minor issue, but important from usability point of view. Other than this, I think we are good so far with Netezza as a whole.

We have been using this product from last 5 years. 

We did not experience any issues.

We haven't had any issues.

We've not experienced any issues.

If volume is the issue, use Netezza. Nothing is better than this product.